When At The End Of Your Rope In Psych Med Withdrawal

Your eyes blearily open after sleeping a few short hours. The first thing you feel is your heart pounding in your chest and a sense of doom unfold before you can even get out of bed. Your body feels toxic and heavy. Your mind begins to race as you wonder how you’ll manage to get through another day of this torment. As you sit up you can feel the pain shoot through you and the anxiety comes crushing down like a thousand pound anvil. You feel yourself overwhelmed with the task of simply surviving. Welcome to another day of psych drug hell….

If you can identify with how this feels, then we are bonded together in a common suffering that few understand. It’s a waking hell that seems to drag on ad infinitum. The searing agony is so intolerable that you may be at a complete loss to convey your feelings into words. I used to have one word for it; wretched. When my symptoms were so bad that I couldn’t even think or talk, I would just utter how “wretched” I felt. It seemed to capture what I was experiencing, because there was no real way to synthesize the list of terrible mental and physical symptoms into an idea that I could relay to anyone. Besides that, I didn’t have the energy to even try. There were many days when I would just plod along and suffer in silence because I couldn’t find anyone to relate to who had lived through what I was living everyday. It was 2015, and though there were groups online talking about psych med/benzo damage, there weren’t many uplifting and successful healing stories that I could find. When I would accidentally come across a horror story of someone still in the throes of despair and torment years after drug cessation, I would be filled with dread and deep fear. Hopelessness would set in and I’d begin to wonder why I should continue on in this state. Eventually, I would just make the simple decision that I was going to keep trying to get better because I owed it to my daughter, my wife, and myself to see if I could make progress. But, sometimes it was so hard that I really didn’t know if I would survive….if I’m being honest.

So, what do you do now that you’re suffering with psych med damage? How can you possibly see going on like this another week, another month, let alone another YEAR? It’s too much to process! The future is always too much to process right here, right now. If there’s one thing that my spiritual awakening and surviving benzo withdrawal has shown me, it’s that I must try to live emotionally, in the present moment. I cannot live next week, today. I cannot let my mind fool me into trying to process all my tomorrows in today’s timeframe. It’s too overwhelming. This day is meant to be lived in the right here and now. Wondering what I will do if I don’t get any better by such and such date will only add to the anxiety, and will not fix anything. I had to truly adopt the old saying, “one day at a time.” It was my mantra and I tried to seriously live it and have trust that I would heal, in time. Trust is a big word. You may ask yourself what there is to trust in. For some people it may be God, the universe, or a higher power. For others, it may be a simple trust that the body knows how to heal and return to homeostasis when we give it love and nurture its innate ability to cure itself.

Whatever you happen to believe in, it helps to believe in something. One of my mentors would ask me if I believed that he had been healed from where he used to be- in the depths of intravenous drug use, despair, and hopelessness. Knowing him now, I had to admit that he was a completely changed person and I clung to the hope that healing could happen for me too. I dared to believe that I could make it out alive. I dared to dream about a day that I would wake up and the awful hell of the reality I knew would be behind me. I spoke to myself and told myself that I was healing, even on the days that I felt the worst(especially on the days I felt the worst). The words we speak have power and energy and I began to really take a look at the words I was using on myself. I started to speak love, light, and hope to my brain and body. After all, why not? I figured that I couldn’t get much worse and so I went on a mission to incorporate anything I could find that might help me heal faster. Whenever I started to go down the road of despair, I would often think of my friend and put my faith in the fact that there had to be others who gotten past this terrible drug damage. This is the reason I choose to speak about my experiences, today. I want to show others that, as bad a shape as I was in- I can now say that I’m mostly healed! I live a life today that, at one time, I thought may not be possible. I want people to hear my story, feel the black hole I was in, and realize that they have the same capacity to make it past where they’re at. If this resonates, then I’m speaking directly to you! You can make it past this and get well again. You are more capable of being restored to health than you realize.

I know it feels bleak and you’ll still have many days of doubt. This journey is a marathon, not a sprint. Don’t compare your timeline to anyone else’s. And please, whenever you begin to doubt whether or not you’ll make it, remember that there’s someone else who has been where you’re at, and has healed significantly. If nothing else, put your trust in that fact.